I pulled the section on Metaphysics (at the bottom of this
post) off the Principia Cybernetica Web site (http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/METAPHI.html)
because Ayten's post inspired me to revisit my father's discussion of the
difference between physics and metaphysics. It is clear to me that
much must have changed in science if the word "metaphysics" is no
longer a slanderous insult. If the word now means only "areas of science
above and beyond physics"-- that's PROGRESS. The rest of this post will
explain why I say that:
Metaphysics, as a concept, used to be lumped in
with telos/teleos (teleology), in the scientific world that my father grew up
in. All such terms, including "metaphysics" were associated
with Aristotle, who in turn was associated with religion/God after the
Scholastic movement of Thomas Aquinas. "Vitalism" (the assertion that
whatever makes living things alive is outside natural/physical
causes) came in there, somewhere, too, along the way. Therefore, to call
a scientist a "meta" ANYTHING, as in "engaging in metaphysics" was
tantamount to saying he was not a scientist at all. To put it another way:
Them were fightin' words! And people did try to pin that designation
on my father-- many, many times. That's where the famous/infamous Robert Rosen
line;"Contemporary physics is too impoverished to answer questions in
biology," comes from. "Impoverished" was his way of saying what he meant, but
also of flinging "metaphysics" right back in their faces.
The definition of metaphysics that I learned from my father was
full of connotations: He said, "It refers to speculative
philosophy, in particular the philosophy of how we
came to be or how all of material reality came to be." He saw metaphysic as
being the preoccupation with ontology (origin of the universe), whereas his
main concern was with epistemology (knowledge of how the universe works).
Indeed, one of his discoveries regarding complex systems is that their
epistemology tells us nothing much about their ontology. When it
came to the connotations of "metaphysics" as an accusation, however, I think
it was the word "speculative" that most irritated my father. He said there was
nothing "speculative" about theory, if you are doing it right. Philosophy has
the freedom to speculate, but science is based on entailment. "It's a causal
world," he used to say. In natural systems, we
talk about causal entailment and in formal systems (models or
mathematics, etc) we are dealing with inferential entailment. He believed
that entailment in the natural world is logical, consistent, and
therefore knowable via science.
The aspects of complexity that drew my father to reject the
contemporary matter-based foundations in science and redevelop the
foundations around organization were, indeed "outside physics". But only
because physics had limited itself to the study of a very narrow band of
material phenomena within the universe. In other words, physics was being
artificially limited to that narrow band and yet still wanted to call itself
the "general science" or the science of general
principles.
I guess it might be fair to characterize my father's attitude as
being one of preserving physics rather than one of tearing it down.
He felt there should be a science of general principles and he was
willing to call it physics, but only if it really was what it purported to be.
In order for that to be so, physics needs to enlarge beyond matter-based
foundations and the concommitant reductionist approaches. I think it's
important to reiterate that my father did not advocate getting rid of
reductionist approaches or ignoring what the study of matter (of "pieces"
and "parts") can teach us. He was advocating removing such things from the
foundations, and putting them somewhere on the main floor. Organization itself
has a context in that there is no organization unless there is something which
is organized. It may be matter-based like a solar system, or it may be a
system made up of thoughts such as consciousness. Both exist and both require
further study, but an organization-based foundation allows the scientific
study of BOTH, whereas the current paradigm does not-- it wants to study the
brain in order to learn about thought. But it wants to study the brain by
studying the parts, the pieces, the subsystems... and so it
goes.
Studying the biochemistry of memory encoding, for example, would
be a necessary aspect of understanding consciousness in an organization-based
approach, but the mindset is different: memory is one subsystem of
consciousness and the biochemistry is one subsystem of memory. If you are
studying biochemistry with a fully developed notion of function and the
self-entailment of complex system organization at the root of the thought
process involved in study, you will be doing things very differently than what
has been done in the past and what is being done now.
Here's the website excerpt from the Principia Cybernetical
website, which I think requires some analysis... but I'll do that in a
separate post: